25 Years of IBM's OS/2 342
harrymcc writes "On April 2nd, 1987 — 25 years ago today — IBM announced OS/2. It was supposed to be the next-generation operating system that would replace DOS. It never did. But for a famous failure, it's doing okay — it still runs the computers that manage the New York Subway's Metrocard fare cards, for instance. Over at TIME.com, I've taken a look at its occasional triumphs, frequent tribulations and enduring legacy."
When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Interesting)
In a way, it's almost like RIM and Nokia/Symbian's rather tremendous falls from grace, care of Apple and Google; i.e. they never stood a chance.
One.Word (Score:5, Interesting)
CONFIG.SYS
Well, there's a longer story. Anybody interested should look into the blind luck and frustration that led to MS building Windows as "PM lite" and chancing into Dave Cutler's expulsion from DEC. The book "Big Blues" is a decent start.
When IBM pivoted hard toward PS/2 and 16-bit computing, Gates took one of the 3 or 4 intuitive gambles that defined both his success and that of Microsoft.
There's ONE simple use case, that illustrates the technical failing of OS/2, vs Windows NT - particularly in face of the claim IBM made for a "Better Windows than Windows". > > >. OS/2 didn't perform a special trap for that key sequence. Nor could it - without the 32-bit native, 'Virtual 8086" mode of the 386 processor. This simple illustration exposes the huge architectural gulf that OS/2 was unprepared to cross as 16-bit. Bill's certainty that 32-bit architecture was demanded by multi-task/multi-user computing in 1989 paid off. Inheriting the VMS brain-trust allowed him to execute, while leveraging the design and code contributions his team had made to the OS/2 project.
Besides that? CONFIG.SYS. Really! A whole /etc directory reduced to the parsability of one file! In this context, the follies of the Windows registry appear to be, comparatively enlightened.
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Slashdot ate my angle-brackets. The >>>> is CTL-ALT-DEL.
Re:One.Word (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it hard to believe the CTL-ALT-DEL would be enough reason for users to quit OS/2 and pick Windows instead.
Of course both of these 80s and early-90s OSes sucked compared to the simplicity of the Mac System 6, or Atari ST-TOS, or the preemptive tasking of the multimedia-capable Amiga OS (since 1985) which was used to create graphics for seaQuest, Babylon 5, and Voyager (one season).
People who wanted power, like for gaming, were not buying either OS/2 or Windows 2/3 on PCs. They were choosing the Atari STs or Commodore Amigas.
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Not trapping CTL-ALT-DEL has nothing to do with the users not accepting the system and everything to do with the underlying technical platform that OS/2 was based on.
That Windows could even trap that sequence was because of it's use of the virtual 8086 mode of the 386 processor, doing low-level stuff with dedicated hardware, rather than the approach that OS/2 took of doing it in software.
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I thought David Cutler left DEC to join MS, I didn't think he was fired... where did you find this information?
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Re:One.Word (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember in at least one version of OS/2 that I used to run (2? Warp?), if you sorted the driver lines in your CONFIG.SYS alphabetically, your boot time would improve dramatically.
I loved OS/2 back in the day.
Re:One.Word (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting, and wrong.
OS/2 1.0 offered a single "DOS box". No claim was made to be a better "Windows than Windows".
With OS/2 2.x, 32 bit mode was exploited, and Virtual 8086 mode as well for multiple DOS boxes. Windows 3 was modified to run in a "virtual friendly" fashion. Remember that IBM had a source license and was allowed to modify Windows 3.
THIS version was a "better Windows than Windows" -- at least 16 bit Windows. Better performance, less crashing.
However, the para-virtualized Windows relied on a certain addressing layout. Microsoft made sure to break that with Windows 95, removing the option of modifying and running under OS/2.
Yes, a monolithic CONFIG.SYS was a bottleneck -- some ran into 100 or more lines. But, practically, not as big a concern. OS/2 was smaller, did not support multi-user, and few file systems. CONFIG.SYS was arguably the right choice. For OS/3... not so much, but then, that became Win NT.
Re:One.Word (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not exactly true. Windows 9x/ME weren't designed from the ground up for 32-bit environments, but Windows NT was. Important stuff always ran on Windows NT, with 9x/ME relegated to systems where less stability wasn't as much of an issue. Hell, Windows 2000 more or less completely replaced 9x in everything but consumer equipment.
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Windows did not take full advantage of the 32-bit architecture until Windows XP. Everything before that was 32-bit bolt-ons to 16-bit underpinnings
Really? I'm pretty sure that there were no 16-bit underpinnings in the NT4 system I was using in 1996. I never used NT3.x, but it was also a complete 32-bit system. Of course, most programs you wanted to run were 16-bit until the late '90s (or were 32-bit using a DOS extender, so didn't work with Windows NT), so there was little advantage in a 32-bit version of Windows. Especially since every Intel chip before the Pentium Pro was faster in 16-bit mode than 32-bit mode...
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Insightful)
fierce and underhanded business tactics
My memory is that you could buy Windows for $60, or OS/2 for $500 or thereabouts. Always thought that might have had something to do with it.
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Informative)
Yea, mine was I could write code for Windows (and DOS) without paying fees but the OS/2 API was $2,000 (or something silly like that; it's been a few years).
[John]
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Plus there was the horrid lack of applications. Open source was still in its infancy, and since the O/S didn't ship with a compiler, it wasn't exactly easy to compile something to run on it.
I think there was eventually a GCC for OS/2, but by that point Win 2000 was out
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I'm pretty skeptical of conspiracy theories so didn't really believe at first that the press was being bought by Microsoft to favor Windows. But what convinced me was an issue of Infoweek I think. One article was headlined that IBM was delaying OS/2 2.0's release by a few months. Buried in the article text it mentioned that several new features were going to
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Windows 3.0 'assumed' a 386 architecture
Not quite. 3.11 required a 386. 3.0 ran happily on my 8086 (well, as long as I didn't run more than a couple of simple apps or one more complex one). It supported three flavours: Real Mode (8086), Standard Mode (286) and Enhanced Mode (386). It would autodetect the best one for your computer, but you could select one manually with /r, /s, or /3. If you specified /r in Windows 3.11, it would refuse to run, saying real mode was not supported.
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I actually considered abandoning Windows myself for it, after a friend showed me what OS/2 Warp could do (its multitasking blew away Windows 3.1, and unlike Mac's, it could run DOS games/software). It may have succeeded if it Warp had come out just a couple of years earlier. As it was, it only beat Win 95 to market by a year or so, and so most people just held out for another year and stuck with Windows.
os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 32s (Score:2, Insightful)
os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 32s v 1.25, Now with it where able to run windows 32 bit apps then it may of killed windows 95.
But MS played it's tricks and os 2 was not pre loaded on that many systems.
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You can also argue that their excellent support for Windows applications contributed to their downfall.
Where I worked, we made the decision to support only Windows because OS/2 could run it just as well (actually better). There was no point in supporting OS/2 natively for us.
Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft used to update win32s every week it seemed then IBM would fix OS/2 to run them. Finally with Win32s v1.30 Microsoft hardcoded some DLLs to load in high memory and as OS/2 only supported 512 MBs per process, no more Win32s support without a lot of work.
Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
There were stories of IBM even solving that problem but deciding that if Microsoft was willing to convolute their OS design to prevent OS/2 from running it once, they'd just keep doing it and so IBM ended the cat/mouse game at Win32S capabilities along with OS/2's already advanced design.
LoB
Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3 (Score:4, Informative)
With Warp server. OS/2 did start to support high memory, first 2 GBs then 3+GBs and with FixPak #13 for V4 they combined the desktop and server kernels and updated V4 to V4.5 which gave high memory support on the desktop.
While they never finished porting the API to be high memory friendly they did a good enough job that things like Firefox, that ran like shit with a 512 MB address space, more like 350 MBs after loading shared DLLs, run quite well. And OS/2 has Odin, sorta Wine for OS/2, which allows some Win32 programs to run and is now being used to compile some Windows programs against. This is how Java 6 and Flash 11 work under OS/2 now. (actually we use the native Flash binary with a wrapper)
Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3 (Score:5, Funny)
10 I
20 REM FIXED CAPITALIZATION
30 might have a valid point in there somewhere - but
40 REM EXTRA COMMA REMOVED
50 sadly, our grammar and punctuation were so poor that it is lost.
60 REM PERIOD ADDED
70 Congratulations,
80 REM FIXED CAPITALIZATION
90 my written english is even less readable than INTERCAL!
100 COMEFROM: 10
110 Fixed that for you.
120 And congratulations on learning INTERCAL, I'm still stuck in BASIC dialects.
130 SYSTEM
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Re:os/2 was not able to windows 32 bit apps just 3 (Score:5, Funny)
parse upper pull obvious_joke
do while (obvious_joke)
select
when (grammar_error)
say requote_with_satirical_comments_added
when (recursion_mentioned)
do
NOP
end
otherwise
if modpoints
say mod_up_insightful
else
say wish_i_had_modpoints
end
parse upper pull obvious_joke
end
/* thanks JD, that was a lot of fun */
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM was pushing OS/2 Warp to compete with Windows NT. I was in college at the time and did a co-op with IBM that year. I had to opportunity to go to COMDEX and IBM gave lots of people a t-shirt that said "Nice Try" (with the N and the T really emphasized) on the front and "OS/2 Warp, Up and Running, Not Up and Coming" on the back. We were to wear the shirt in the audience of Bill Gates keynote when he officially announced Windows NT.
I still have that T-Shirt.
My old fart rant. Ex-IBM'er contractor. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was in college at the time and did a co-op with IBM that year.
My group used to call you CO-OP guys "NOP"'s - no operation - as in assembly 'NOP'.
You were easy to pick out - shirt and tie for the first week on your NOP job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we gave you punks a hard time, but it was out of love, man. You were sharp and ambitious and would end up as our boss. We had to take our shots while we could.
I still have that T-Shirt.
Me too.
I was in my local NAPA auto parts store and this old guy (even older than me) saw that shirt and said, "That's a really old T-Shirt."
Long story short, he was one of those guys that took an early retirement.
When I was at Boca, I watched all those "out of date loser" mainframers come down from NY to do shit jobs. I smugly thought, "That's what you get for not staying current!"
How arrogant I am. And I'm ashamed for it.
I escaped to a so-so business back office programming job while others were poached by Microsoft - the smart ones which wasn't me (Peter, peter rice eater - you rock man! I hope you're a MS Millionaire because you deserve it!).
The ironic thing is that the Hartford Insurers (who still train, btw) need some mainframers.
I met the most obscenely talented and genius people at IBM.
Looking back, it was the most humbling experience ever - and I was too arrogant to take that lesson in at that time. Then again, we have to be arrogant to get jobs in this fucked up industry, don't we? Saying, "I don't know." is the kiss of death.
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The one thing I learned while I was there was that it wasn't the place for me.....at least not working in the area I was cop-op'ing in. I was in the Ultimedia Tools Series segment (a group trying to define some interop standards between the burgeoning multimedia field). In my evening hours, I even helped beta test Storyboard Live 2.0 (going above and beyond). It was fun being out in the Bay area being a young college student, but not where I wanted to be long term.
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I tried Warp and the problem for me was RAM. You see, at the time, a 386sx40 with 4MB of RAM and a 170MB HD was an average machine but it wasn't enough to run Warp decently. Warp just didn't run at Warp speeds on that hardware. If Warp would have appeared a few years earlier, the problem would have been worse.
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Informative)
Same reason why it took Linux so long to gain some speed. Let's be honest here, it's a great system. But run it on the 486DX available in 1990 or the early Pentiums and you're in for a very, very slow and sorry ride. Compare to DOS, which is MUCH more lightweight, it had no chance.
Sure, Linux was even back then a full blown multitasking, multiuser system, nothing DOS could have held a candle to in any sense (actually, Linux farting would have blown out that candle without even aiming in the right direction), but the problem was simple: Nobody cared. Multiuser, multitasking system on a box that can barely run ONE task without overextending its CPU power? What for?
OS/2 suffered the same problem, it was a great system, it had great features but the hardware it was supposed to run on was not up to it. And the features went unused, both by software and the user, which in turn makes the DOS/Windows combo the "better" system in the eyes of the user. Simply because it was faster. Yes, from a technology point of view it was inferior to OS/2 (hell, even NT4.0 was), no doubt about that. But the superiority of OS/2 didn't "arrive" at the user.
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually considered abandoning Windows myself for it, after a friend showed me what OS/2 Warp could do (its multitasking blew away Windows 3.1, and unlike Mac's, it could run DOS games/software). It may have succeeded if it Warp had come out just a couple of years earlier. As it was, it only beat Win 95 to market by a year or so, and so most people just held out for another year and stuck with Windows.
I don't think it was the timing of Warp's release - after all, even OS/2 2.1 was superior to Windows 3.1. Problem was that OS/2 had double the memory requirements, which was a major showstopper at the time. Although it supported all DOS device drivers, there was always the problem of which systems wouldn't run it.
Also, for PC makers, IBM was a competitor, while Microsoft was not. That too was a part of the decision. Also, IBM took way too long and ultimately aborted Workplace OS, which was to have succeeded OS/2. That turned out to be the death knell for the OS.
After Microsoft merged Windows 9x and NT in Windows 2000, the rationale for OS/2 was pretty much gone. Which, alongside the demise of Amiga, NEXTSTEP, NT-RISC, was some of the tragic reasons for which all we have today is Windows and Unix (I'm considering Linux, BSD, Solaris and all their derivatives as Unix).
Re:When OS meant Computer (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking back now, I might have been able to tweak it and get it usable if I had been willing to invest the time in it, but I instead focused my energy on FreeBSD (2.1!) and that turned out to be the better choice anyway.
The one thing I did like about that machine: PC-DOS was better than MS-DOS. Not a lot better, but its memory management was just slightly superior so that the constant headaches my friends had with trying to get stuff to run on their MS-DOS machines (damn, 1MB short of base memory!) was not a problem on mine. I never had to make boot floppies to get Doom to run because PC-DOS was slightly better about getting stuff up into High Memory).
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Also, for PC makers, IBM was a competitor, while Microsoft was not.
Yes, this. Anyone here remember Micro Channel? That, more than anything else, was what killed OS/2's "hacker cred".
I was in high school at the time, but I'd been hacking on home IBM PCs for a few years and was in the BBS scene. I remember the long and nasty legal wars IBM fought to restrict "cloning" of the otherwise open PC, and how prices of PC-compatibles only finally fell to affordable levels for home users once IBM got undersold by the young beige-box upstarts like Dell. I remember IBM being this huge
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Sorry, but no. OS/2 was heaps more expensive than DOS, which also came bundled with a computer. Then, there was very, very little software for OS/2 itself. I distinctly remember using OS/2 in the company I was working for at that time, and all it did was run Windows programs.
What made OS/2 fail was a lack of marketing and a lack of software.
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10% Mac
Citation? All of the recent sources say 5%. [venturebeat.com]
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It all depends on how and what you are counting. I believe the 10% number is usually described as the number of Apple computers and it includes iPads.
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In 1995, mobile phones were expensive and clunky bricks used only by a minority.
Now ... well, the figure above is pretty much meaningless if it doesn't include them.
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You're throwing those numbers around like they actually matter.
How many people do you know today who have a tablet or smartphone but no computer, or use their computers as an auxiliary device? I know quite a few. Not a majority yet, but then, I work in IT.
The personal computer was always viewed in its early days by many as "electronics as social change". We've had that transformation. The next wave of transformation will be in distributed mobile computing.
I would not be surprised if, by 2015, people don't b
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This is exactly the revisionist history I'm talking about. You are completely full of shit and trolling
No I'm not.
Win95 was widely regarded as a step backwards from NT
But it was a step up from Windows 3.11 and it was a lot cheaper than NT. More importantly, the hardware requirements were much lower. 95 could just about run in 8MB of RAM and worked reasonably in 16MB. NT 4 wasn't happy with under 32MB and worked a lot better with 64MB.
It wasn't competition from OS/2. By then, OS/2 and NT were primarily targetting the server which was never a role Win95 was ever considered.
The server was largely irrelevant. It was dominated by Novell at the low end and UNIX at the high end. OS/2, NT, and 95 were all targeting the desktop / workstation market. It was the niche that OS/2 retreated to after faili
Brings a tear to my eye (Score:3, Interesting)
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Gates schooled IBM... (Score:5, Insightful)
...on aggressive partnering and OEM tactics. That was his real contribution to MS, nothing technical.
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You are really underestimating Gates and his intellect.
Don't Push Us! (Score:2, Informative)
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Microsoft has made these mistakes several times, recently with Microsoft Vista.
Vista works fine on those machines with which it was sold now that it's been service packed. It's not a case of the hardware not being ready for Vista, but a case of Vista not being ready for the hardware. Or even ready.
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Yeah, I still remember when my GF's sister asked me if she should get a Vista laptop with 512MB RAM. I advised against it and told her my opinion on what should be done to vendors who crammed Vista on a 512MB box. It wasn't pretty.
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The big problem is how expensive RAM was at the time and how cutthroat PC pricing was. The end result was that very few computers at retail had more than 1GB of RAM for the first year or two of Vista's run. I cringed seeing Vista on less than 2GB. And it was even worse before SP1.
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OH the memories (Score:5, Informative)
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I've created batch files to do something like this - running the batch file would open everything in a given folder. Not quite as good as implementing it right into the OS, but it worked for what I needed. It was handy for repetitive tasks I had to do daily or weekly (recording backups from a myriad of sources into a single spreadsheet was a big one).
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I actually do this exact thing. When I get to work in the morning, dock and boot my laptop, I run a batch file containing this:
start /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Lync" communicator.exe /d "C:\Users\kozz\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\" chrome.exe /d "C:\Eclipse\" eclipse.exe /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Phone\" Skype.exe /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\" Outlook.exe
start
start
start
start
sc start OracleOraDb10g_home1TNSListener
sc start OracleServiceDEV
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OSFree (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, I never owned a PC during the time that OS/2 was around, and so never got to experience what it was. But most of the people who ever used it liked it. Just hearing about some of the concepts - dragging a file to a printer icon in order to print - blew me away. An OS that would have been the offspring of OS/2 and NEXTSTEP would have been just purrrfekt!
In college, I learnt about microprocessor design on a PPC 601 - the first PPC to come out after IBM did a derivative design of it along w/ Motorola (now Freescale). Knowing that OS/2 was going to have an uphill battle outside IBM (heck, even Amber didn't offer the OS), I was rooting for OS/2-PPC, which was known as Workplace OS. Unfortunately, as it turned out, Mach 3 turned out to be a horrible choice for a kernel (and Hurd pretty much made the same mistake in going w/ it) and finally, IBM canned it. That was the real death knell of OS/2, and w/ it died any real hopes of the PPC getting popular outside Apple (as far as computers go - I'm not thinking about consoles or other boxes)
Incidentally, today, there is a project called OSFree [osfree.org], which is similar in concept to Workplace OS, except that it uses the more recent L4 micro-kernel as its underpinning. The concept here is good - on top of the micro-kernel, they plan to use different 'personalities', such as Presentation Manager, Win32, DOS and even Linux (there already exists an L4Linux, so they may not do much more on that one), as well as a Neutral personality, which would provide the services that the other personalities require. The advantage here is that the portability of the L4 has already been demonstrated, since after an initial design w/ some assembly code, it was found that replacing assembly code w/ C didn't have any performance impact.
I know that at this point in the game, computers based on anything other than x64 or ARM are pretty much non-starters, but it would be fantastic if such a project actually came to fruition. That would be a good step towards portable computing, while giving just about any architecture the ability to have an environment like OS/2. Hopefully, all the major FOSS software will be ported there, and that platform would then have a chance of being viable. I think that b/w OSFree and ReactOS, there should be enough opportunity for OSs that decide to take advantage of the end of support for XP. Maybe a laptop based on a MIPS or PPC can have a go at it
It was great... once upon a time. (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran OS/2 extensively from '93 to '03. OS/2 was way ahead of it's time in many ways - maybe too much so. It was a great solid system and the GUI was much better than most of what we have today. it's a shame that IBM couldn't market it properly but they were working against the massive marketing force that MS had back then. That, and the fact that OS really ran best with at least 16mb or RAM back in a time when 8mb was considered excessive. Once Win95 came out OS/2 was pretty much on a fast path to it's death. That clearly demonstrated that the PC industry was more about marketing and deals than producing a better product because windows 95 was absolute trash in comparison.
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That, and the fact that OS really ran best with at least 16mb or RAM back in a time when 8mb was considered excessive.
Funny that you can say that with a straight face. Until just very recently 90+% of Slashdotters considered the idea that MSWindows needing even a single k more RAM than a full featured Linux system as a sign of bloat and incompetence on the part of MS. Now people can just shrug it off in a time when doubling your system RAM was no small bill to foot? Wow. Just wow.
I can only
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I remember IBM really pushing the sales of OS/2 Warp. However, I couldn't ever *find* the software for sale. Also, this was during a period when some machines were sold with only DOS, but an increasing number of systems were moving to having Windows pre-installed. Very quickly, Microsoft closed the gap through pre-installations, creating a giant barrier to competition. Once that window of opportunity was closed, OS/2 and other operating systems had no chance. Apple only succeeded in having their own hardwar
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Once Win95 came out OS/2 was pretty much on a fast path to it's death.
Windows didn't kill OS/2. Sure, Microsoft's per-processor licensing agreements had ensured that OEMs shipping computers with OS/2 wouldn't compete from a price perspective (as you were effectively paying for copies of DOS and/or Windows you weren't receiving), and their weekly Win32s updates ensured that OS/2 couldn't run Win32 software better than Windows -- but all those succeeded at doing was to keep OS/2 more on the margins, ala MacOS and Linux at the time.
No, what really killed OS/2 was IBM's push in
College (Score:2)
When I was in college (about 3 years ago), they were discussing upgrading one of the wood shop's machine control PCs from OS/2 to Windows 95. I never found out if they went ahead with it, or where they planned to get a non-buggy version of Windows 95.
Titans of the industry (Score:5, Interesting)
"More than 250 companies declared their intention to deliver OS/2 apps, including biggies such as Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland and Novell."
OK, that made me smile.
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"More than 250 companies declared their intention to deliver OS/2 apps, including biggies such as Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland and Novell."
OK, that made me smile.
Why?
When I was at IBM Boca (when it existed), we had all those apps running and they were available for sale at your local computer store.
I remember the Borland OS/2 compiler rather fondly, although, at IBM we were stuck with Visual Age - a pig - during the Warp days. Before that we had Microsoft's C/C++ compiler and that was pretty good.
Novell, I guess that made you smile. Although, the networking on OS/2 (TCP/IP, Netbeui) was quite combersome and a bitch to get around - that was written by IBM along with
I ran a two line BBS on Warp (Score:2)
CIBC (Score:2)
The question I have is in maintaining OS/2 applications what programming tool do you use? So regardless of the potential quality of such an old system I would think the costs in staying in that game would be prohibitive. Where do you get a 386 these days?
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Older processors and hardware (such as the 386 and 486 era stuff) are still produced, usually for things such as factory robots that value reliability over everything else and don't require much in the way of processing power. Not sure where you might buy them at the consumer level.
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Re:CIBC (Score:5, Interesting)
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As the sibling mentions, OS/2 still installs and runs on some modern hardware, only 32 bit though.
Most programming is done with GCC with ver 4.4.6 being the newest. OpenWatcom being the other supported compiler and the choice for device drivers and such.
I'm typing this on Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; Warp 4.5; rv:10.0.4esrpre) Gecko/20120331 Firefox/10.0.4esrpre SeaMonkey/2.7 built with GCC 4.4.1 on a core2duo.
Micro Channel ! (Score:2)
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Micro Channel. I really liked it. Easy to install and setup. I remember those days fondly.
From a hardware standpoint -- I mean the literal nuts and bolts -- I really liked the fact with Microchannel machines (PS/2s), you could open the case and swap cards and components without tools, just thumbscrews and finger-friendly fasteners for most part.
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You forgot the sarcasm tags. Nobody misses config floppies. Might as well wax lyrical over EISA.
Technically OS/2 was very impressive. (Score:2, Interesting)
Had excellent scripting, good multitasking, was very stable at the time compared to just about anything that you could run on PC hardware. I also remember it as being very fast, unless you ran Windows applications on it.
IBM was just not flexible enough to win. The exact same thing is happening to Microsoft right now with the only difference being that while IBMs desktop efforts died with very solid products at hand, Microsoft falls on their nose with crapware. Dont get me started on the duct taped Windows P
OS/2 Somehow still alive (Score:2)
Some community banks still run OS/2 to power their Voice Banking systems. The reason being is that the hardware dies before the software does.
The other amazing thing is how OS/2 will run on PC's just made a few years ago. As long as it has a PS/2 port, IDE port, and a PCI slot for your ancient 3com NIC.
Ah, the memories of my first PC (Score:2)
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As far as user interface goes however, it felt much nicer than the PC alternatives until either 95 or 98 came out.
I disagree. I was always unsure as to what mouse button I should use for a task, even after I had been using OS/2 2.1 for a week. And while I had spent quite a bit of time playing with one button, and quite a bit of time using a Mac too, I also had experience with the Amiga, with Windows 3.1, and with ScumOS.
The one time I saw Bill Gates in person (Score:2)
was when I heard him give a talk on OS/2 and how it was the future of Microsoft. This was at the University of Washington, and obviously sometime between late 1987 and 1988. A very narrow slice of history indeed.
Good old OS/2.. (Score:3, Funny)
Good feature sets (Score:2)
If I remember correctly (I can't find my notes), OS2 was a port of IBM's mainframe 32-bit OS scaled for the microcontroller. If you connected using a 3270 terminal or emulator you could get some pretty fast apps going. Of course, people wanted to work from the desktop, not a terminal. The killer was the graphical interface, which never worked right. Furthermore, new apps for the desktop were hard to write, and required developers to be fully immersed in the IBM programming paradigm and mindset. On the other
Re: (Score:2)
No, it was not. OS/2 has nothing to do about OS/400 (I guess you are refering to that one). OS/2 is an independent development, in which _probably_ you can find traces of ideas and implementations in other operating systems, but you can say the same about any OS. Take into account OS/2 1.X was being developed by Microsoft, and it was when MS switched their goals to enhance the Windows Family when IBM toke the lead.
Wasn't a Port (Score:3)
I got on the OS/2 bandwag
This reminds me (Score:2)
http://www.theinquirer.net/img/7144/os2thing.jpg [theinquirer.net]
The technology created of OS/2 lives on in Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember it well, I was tasked with a number of OS/2 projects. Recoding MS's writelog function, making it asynchronous (non-blocking), creating the (AT) VGA driver, creating (AT) ST506 driver, and the biggest challenge ever, I was tasked with creating the final quality control steps/code/testing methodology.
I knew the final QC phase would be huge, an almost impossible challenge, since the Microsoft's core staff was mostly Recent College Grads who would take many of inappropriate shortcuts. Thus it would take something extraordinary to beat their code into something useful.
If I had failed, I suspect the micro computer industry would have been stuck in a dark age for at least a decade, maybe more.
The biggest hurtle was there would be no way to fully test all combinations of system functions, our SUN would burn out first(billions of years). Instead of attempting the impossible, I did the next best thing.
I created a series of revolutionary stress tests for that project. The component programs were a series if self checking programs which used out of phase pseudo random number generators. The resulting (re-creatable) data patterns were used for both the function parameters and content, and the longer they executed, the greater the testing coverage.
Long story short.. The first release of OS/2 (86) never saw the light of day.. It couldn't even pass the individual component stress tests, let alone dozens of them in combination, all controlled by my screen manager. Sloppy coding techniques and shortcuts had forced MS coders to go back to drawing board and start over from scratch.
Net result, those stress tests uncovered many flaws, including hardware problems, and major software issues, some of which were carry overs from PC/MS/DOS. They were discovered and fixed, some of them were folded back into next release PC/MS/DOS, 4.0. Thus making DOS based PC's useful for large databases for the very first time.
In the end, the code, the methodology I created, was so far ahead of everything else they quickly took over all other forms of OS testing at both IBM and MS. And it lives on to this day, Microsoft has ten's of thousands people creating/running modern permutations of those 24hr stress tests I pioneered for the birth of OS2, using it to find and fix bugs in all versions of windows.
Usability killed it (Score:4, Interesting)
Despite all that if you knew what you were doing it was far more superior to anything Microsoft had at the time. I'm sure Microsoft engaged in all kinds of sharp practice but it really needn't have bothered. IBM was its own worst enemy. By the time NT4.0 / W2K were appearing there was no reason at all to use OS/2.
double digit market share in Germany (Score:3)
I remember those days well. Like how Object Oriented Programming was very popular and resulted in application frameworks making cross platform software easy and fun. But with every innovation in software development came a Microsoft counter example of doing it differently and such that it only ran on Windows. OOP on Windows was called object-like. The common 3D graphics system was OpenGL but Microsoft came up with Direct3D on it's DirectX. IBM created DIVE(Direct Video Interface) and hired a small software company called ID Software to port the Doom engine to OS/2 using DIVE to show off OS/2's capabilities. That's about the time Microsoft employees were running around Comdex crashing OS/2 machines with floppy disks designed to do that.
I will send out a big "thank you Linux and the FSF" for GNU/Linux and the ability to stay away from Microsoft's software and the repeating head aches it's brought so many. I see so many on the various social media sites disappearing and then reappearing weeks later saying their Windows computers broke.
LoB
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When you consider how reliable the Metrocard system is, I wouldn't call this a failure by any means.
Also, MTA Is a big enough customer that they probably still get direct support from IBM for OS/2. If the system is supported, then it's not really "out of date".
I hear some ATMs (as in bank machines) still run OS/2 too. It's a very robust system and had a lot of popularity in embedded commercial "appliance" devices.
Re:okay ? (Score:5, Informative)
... would consider this a failure of New York Subway's and not an indication how good OS/2 really is.
Why is that a failure of the subway system? I live in New York and I take the subway every day. The computer system always works fine for me, there's hardly any time that I swipe my card and it erroneously doesn't open the turnstile for me. From a customer perspective, whatever software they're using, it's very reliable.
Re: (Score:2)
Not anymore. The ADA placed new rules on ATMs last year, requiring all ATMs to be blind compliant by March 15, 2012. Hundreds of thousands of perfectly good ATMs were removed from service, as they could not be upgraded. And this at a time when people bitch about banks not making loans. Talk about broken window fallacy....
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Re:Runs most ATM (Score:4, Interesting)
Up until recently, the teller terminals at my bank ran OS/2, but it was basically just a platform to run terminal sessions to the mainframe. Then they switched over to a browser-based front end to a UNIX back end.
The company I work for still supports old, legacy, OS/2 systems used for telephone menuing systems. It's funny that when there is a problem, many of the employees we support have no idea where the machine is located. It was literally stuck in an office somewhere and has been running completely unattended for years. It never gets updates. It never has to reboot. It just runs... and runs... and runs.
The problem we have now is finding hardware old enough to support it. We have to use 80GB drives for replacement and set up a 2GB partition for the OS and software. The rest just sits there idle. AT motherboards, ISA graphics and PS/2 keyboards and mice are getting harder and harder to find.
Re:Runs most ATM (Score:5, Informative)
There's tons of old OS/2 boxes chugging along in a corner somewhere until the hardware finally breaks. OS/2 sales in the form of eComStation has been tripling each year lately due to places like your work needing to install OS/2 on modern hardware. http://ecomstation.com/ [ecomstation.com]
And it will still install and run on modern hardware though you have to choose carefully. No accelerated video and only ATI supported. Barely any wireless support and only a few network cards supported. Sound based on Alsa so most sound cards including built in supported. 512 GB partitions if you want them compatible with other operating systems, otherwise the ancient architecture is limited to 2 TB. Best to stick to Intel hardware, especially if you want to take advantage of all cores. OS/2 is licensed per CPU, not core so it does do SMP. Only 64 cores supported though.
Re:Runs most ATM (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to invalidate mod points for this, but did you try to use Compact Flash memory cards as hard drives?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200175 [newegg.com]
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313247 [newegg.com]
It may be cheaper/quieter/cooler/faster than trying to find working 80G disks.
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Funny enough timing wise, just last week at work we had a hardware failure in an old OS/2 computer that controls one of our radial insertion machines on the production line. I too ran into similar issues with replacement hardware.
In my case, the PC has a custom ISA card that acts as a controller to the machine hardware.
I found a product called isa2usb [arstech.com] from a company called Arstech combined with VirtualBox that did a good job getting that custom controller board working with newer hardware.
VirtualBox has de
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Some Cashpoints (RBS and Lloyds TSB) run Windows XP.
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MS and IBM were partners in the beginning... but Bill Gates got his nickers in a twist and pulled out of OS/2, taking what was to become NT with him (or at least the start of it.)
OS/2 was supposed to be the successor of Win 3.x, but for many reasons (you can google yourself)... it never happened. Ironically, OS/2 got better when Microsoft left the table. :)